How Ricursive Intelligence raised $335M at a $4B valuation in 4 months

Ricursive Intelligence, co-founded by AI veterans Anna Goldie (CEO) and Azalia Mirhoseini (CTO), has rapidly raised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation within just four months of launching. Both founders have a distinguished background, having worked together at Google Brain and Anthropic, and are credited with creating the Alpha Chip—an AI tool that drastically accelerates chip layout design from a process that takes humans over a year to just hours. Unlike most AI chip startups aiming to compete with Nvidia, Ricursive focuses on building AI tools that automate and speed up chip design for existing chip manufacturers, including Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, who are also investors or target customers. The core innovation behind Ricursive stems from their Alpha Chip project, which uses reinforcement learning to optimize chip layouts by iteratively improving design quality based on a reward signal. This approach enables the AI to learn from thousands of designs, becoming both faster and more accurate over time. Ricursive’s platform extends this concept